Review: ‘The Girl on a Motorcycle’

A pretty young girl in a leather form-fitting getup covering her nudity rides a powerful motorcycle towards her lover after creeping out of her young husband's bed. Her ride is studded with flashbacks and even flash forwards and psychedelic inserts of torrid love-making. The ride gets a bit long and the film lacks a true erotic flair. But it is well lensed and has a shattering finale.

A pretty young girl in a leather form-fitting getup covering her nudity rides a powerful motorcycle towards her lover after creeping out of her young husband’s bed. Her ride is studded with flashbacks and even flash forwards and psychedelic inserts of torrid love-making. The ride gets a bit long and the film lacks a true erotic flair. But it is well lensed and has a shattering finale.

The motorcycle is a present from her lover and is supposed to be an erotic symbol. But treatment [of the 1963 novel La motocyclette by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues] can rarely give the fiery dash to make this acceptable except in the girl’s final mixing of metaphors as she literally makes love to the bike.

Marianne Faithfull [whose dialogue is revoiced by an uncredited actress] appears a bit too showy and on the surface as the girl and uses facile facial expressions rather than being able to project the girl’s feelings. Alain Delon is a sort of hedonistic young college don who does not believe in love in a romantic sense and is mad about motorcycles.